2005 Guardian Award Winner is Concerned About Bioterrorism

This year’s Guardian Award recipient is Ray Kurzweil.

Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical
character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the
blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first commercially
marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray has successfully
founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech
recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment,
cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence. All of these
technologies continue today as market leaders. Ray’s Web site,
KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence.

Ray Kurzweil had grown increasingly worried about bioterrorism and now
advocates a one hundred billion dollar program to accelerate the
development of technologies to combat biological viruses. He says “We have an
existential threat now in the form of the possibility of a bioengineered
malevolent biological virus. With all the talk of bioterrorism, the
possibility of a bioengineered bioterrorism agent gets little and
inadequate attention. The tools and knowledge to create a bioengineered
pathogen are more widespread than the tools and knowledge to create an
atomic weapon, yet it could be far more destructive. I’m on the Army
Science Advisory Group (a board of five people who advise the Army on
science and technology), and the Army is the institution responsible for
the nation’s bioterrorism protection. Without revealing anything
confidential, I can say that there is acute awareness of these dangers,
but there is neither the funding nor national priority to address them
in an adequate way.”

Ray Kurzweil goes on to state “the means and knowledge will soon exist
in a routine college bioengineering lab (and already exists in more
sophisticated labs) to create unfriendly pathogens more dangerous than
nuclear weapons.”

Finally, Ray thinks the threat of grey goo should not be ignored. He
states “Grey goo certainly represents power  destructive power
 and if
such an existential threat were to prevail, it would represent a
catastrophic loss… Although the existential nanotechnology danger is
not yet at hand, denial is not the appropriate strategy.”